Russia's Imperial Nature and Its Continued Partial Decay are the Country's Real Problems, Zaydman Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 30 – Other empires have come to an end, but Russia’s has experienced a different and more tragic trajectory, Vadim Zaydman says. It has periodically fallen apart – twice in the 20^th century alone -- but then has partially reconstituted itself only to set the stage for its falling apart more completely in the next round.

            “In 1991,” the Moscow commentator continues, Russians “mistakenly decided that the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the destruction of communism was the final and irreversible collapse of evil, an exit from darkness into the light and from slavery into freedom” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5A1EDEF944A52).

            But it turned out to be too soon to be happy with that outcome, Zaydman continues. Once again, “this was not the final disintegration but only a partial disintegration. [And] it turned out that the chief evil was not in communism but in the imperial essence of the Russian state” regardless of the livery in which it decked itself out.

            As a result, after a brief interval and claiming to feel “phantom wounds,” the empire began to try to reassert itself; but it could do so only in part and by so doing could not fail to restart yet another semi-disintegration that would leave the country ever small, just as 1917 and 1991 did.

            Vladimir Putin, Russia’s ruler today, “is an outstanding 19^th century politicians” who is trying to preserve the Russian Empire in the 21^st, an effort doomed to failure however much bluff and bluster he brings to the attempt and one that has no more genuine vitality than “an exhibit in a museum.”

            This cycle of partial disintegration followed by partial reconquest will continue, Zaydman says, until the Russian people and its rulers finally recognize that “the imperial essence” of the Russian state “is the chief centuries-long curse of Russia and its Achilles’ heel” and until they see that each new iteration of this process is ever less an empire and ever more a parody of one.

            “The more parody-like this becomes, the commentator continues, the more people will experience these phantom pains until from the former greatness of the past will remain only the Muscovite principality, from which, in fact, all this began.”